Republicans Lose Everything, Respond by Promoting Jim Jordan

The Vote, Such As It Was

Here is what we know, and it is not much yet. Republican lawmakers elected Jordan as their leader in the House by secret ballot, a result first reported by Punchbowl News on Tuesday afternoon. The Guardian's early report promised more details soon, which in breaking-news language means the vote tally, the margin, and the identity of any rivals are still being sorted out.

What is not in dispute is the outcome. Jordan, a veteran congressman from Ohio, will lead House Republicans when Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress in January. He gets the job of minority leader for the final two years of Donald Trump's second term.

That is the whole story, and somehow it is still a lot to absorb.

A Resounding Loss, Followed By a Victory Lap

Let's be clear about the sequence of events. Last week, Republicans took a beating in the midterms. Democrats are preparing to run both the House and the Senate. This is what a political party experiences when voters look at the product and decline to buy it.

The standard response to that kind of night is some version of introspection. Maybe a postmortem. Maybe a leader with a different style, a different pitch, a different relationship with the median voter. Parties that lose big often at least pretend to want that.

House Republicans looked at their options and picked the guy who is the loyalty test in human form. It is the political equivalent of a restaurant getting a terrible health inspection and responding by hiring a louder host.

Who Jim Jordan Actually Is

Jordan is a veteran congressman and a Trump loyalist. Those are the two facts The Guardian leads with, and they are the two facts that explain the vote. He is not being chosen for his legislative deal-making, his appeal to swing districts, or his talent for building coalitions. He is being chosen because he is reliably, loudly, unflinchingly on Team Trump.

That is a perfectly coherent strategy if your only goal is to keep the base happy and the boss unbothered. It is a much stranger strategy if your goal is to win elections in the places where Republicans just lost them. Those two goals are not the same, and this vote tells you which one the caucus picked.

And notice the timing. The party did not wait for the dust to settle or for any serious debate about why it lost. The wounds were a week old and the answer was already on the ballot.

Two Years in the Minority

Here is the thing about being in the minority: you do not get to run the place. Democrats will control the committees, the calendar, and the gavels. Republicans will control the microphones, and Jordan is very good at microphones.

Expect the next two years to feature a lot of noise aimed at the administration's opponents and very little in the way of governing. When Democrats start oversight, Jordan's caucus will answer with spectacle. When Democrats move legislation, Jordan's caucus will answer with objections, and a President with a veto pen will make most of it theoretical anyway.

The next two years in Washington are going to be a standoff between a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House, with Jordan as the designated loud person on the Republican side of the room.

What Comes Next

The details are still arriving. We do not yet have the full vote count or the full cast of who ran against him, and we will update as the reporting fills in. What we have is enough to know the direction of travel.

The party that just got shellacked in the midterms has decided its best path forward is more of the same, delivered by a man who has built his career on delivering exactly that. Whether the voters who just rejected Republicans will find that convincing in two years is a question the caucus has chosen not to ask.